April 17, 2006

I have a problem. My addled brain has apparently confused remington steele with some other tv show from the mid 80s.

There was a gimmick in this tv show. There was a female detective who, no matter what she did, couldn’t seem to get the person who puts names on doors to put her name on the door. However, this other guy moved in across the hall and his name was put on the door right away.

So, I am calling on the lazy web to help me. Can anyone remember a tv show from the mid80s (or thereabouts) where the above occurred? It was the running gag throughout the entire series, which, it occurs to me, could have been very short lived.

April 13, 2006

Car:

I cleaned out my car, got it washed and waxed and took a trip to carmax today. I waited around while they appraised it and they came back with an amount that made it not-quite a no-brainer. So, I left and thought about it some. Talked to some folks who I normally talk to about decisions like this. But it was a simple statement by the girl that clenched it for me. She said “But what are you getting out of your car by having it?” She was right, of course. The car had been sitting in the driveway more-or-less unused for the last 2 or so months. It was eating up money and not gaining in value while not providing in obvious service to me or anyone else. I returned to carmax, with her following in her car, and sold mine. I got enough for it to come out right-side-up on my car loan and to put a significant dent in my student loan. While I’m not quite debt-free I’m closer than I was. One more month and I’ll be completely debt-free, I think. Just in time to launch into a massive amount of debt to buy a house, if we decide to do that. 🙂

So, we are not car-free but we are down to one car between the two of us and that one’s use is definitely light.

I was reading bike forums tonight and I stumbled on a page for estimating commuting costs. It appears I was using up an additional $608/month when I was driving to work. When I stopped driving to work the expenses dropped to $450/month but still owning the car took its toll. It’s nice to see the obvious fuel savings.

Reading

I’m almost finished with the weather makers and I think I need to take a break from the bleak-future-outlook nonfiction for a while and maybe read something a little more playful. I bought a copy of the Tattooed Map – a book we found in the B&B we stayed at while in Dunedin, NZ. I only got to start it before we had to leave and I wanted to find out how it ends. I think that might be a good diversion before finishing The Long Emergency.

Bizarrely, the bloomberg energy price page has become a point of morbid fascination for me to watch oil prices creep up toward $70/barrel. I read it every day now and check it from time to time just to see how it will impact my own energy prices. Regular is $2.89/gallon at a lot of places around here and from what I’m seeing the rise is not quite finished for this particular spike and not even begun for the longer-term.

Yum and friends

Felt pretty good monday night when I was able to chew through a bunch of outstanding older bugs and I really seemed to make a dent in some of my backlog. I think we’ve solved the comps-has-changed-now-mock-is-broken problem and once those last couple of patches are checked a new mock version should come out to simplify everyone’s lives, sorta.

I was also able to refine some things in reposync and after talking with che for a while on irc I think it might be useful enough to get it cleaned up and available in yum-utils.

Finally, I got through the backlog of yum patches I needed to review and/or commit and I even wrote a couple of related emails for the devel branch. Now to figure out the provides bug that’s been reported on 2.6.0 and get it fixed before releasing 2.6.1. Hopefully, that can happen tomorrow or this weekend.

Work

Work has been not-so-great, recently. For a variety of reasons I don’t want to talk about here it has been my least favorite place to be. It’s bad when things at work are so painfully de-motivating that they impact other portions of your life. Sadly the demotivation is a result of trying to change things to make the environment a lot more reliable and meeting A LOT of resistance. It makes me sad. I think I’m going to have to start segmenting my time more coarse-grainedly like I did in physics about 10 months ago. It’s the only way I’m going to be able to be productive on things that actually matter to me while maintaining some semblance of sanity. I thought that problem would get better with this new job but I had underestimated the reactionary impulse of various factions. We’ll see how the next few months go. If things continue as they have for the last month I’ll be evaluating my options much more closely. It’ll be a shame if it goes that way. Much potential would be squelched.

April 2, 2006

David Zeuthen and John (J5) Palmieri – if you are reading this please fix your blog rss feed locations. I’ve disabled your entries until then b/c I’d like to not get an email every 20 minutes about it. 🙂

April 2, 2006

Today I had more errands to run and the girl and I wanted to do _something_ together. So, off to elmos, then to food lion to return some green beans (btw, 10 cans of green beans in your panniers is a quite capable theft deterrent). Then over to east campus and down campus drive to the duke gardens where we wandered around a bit. Back home, then I took off by myself to pet smart and kroger (to return the collar that didn’t work and to get the correct cans of green beans). Then off to Great Outdoor Provisioning to pick up a couple pair of boxers and a tshirt.

April 1, 2006

I’ve been riding my bike to work since I changed jobs at duke. In the beginning I was mostly getting on the bike about 3 days a week now I’m up to pretty much every day. Friday I had a number of errands to run at lunch time. I went out, grabbed lunch. Ran by the bike shop to see when a tune up would be a good plan. Then down to Food Lion to pick up canned green beans for cori. Next, home to drop of the ten cans of green beans (which weigh markedly more than you might expect). Next, grab some water get back on and go off to bed, bath and beyond human suffering to get a water filter and then to pet smart (in the same shopping center) to get a new collar (a misbegotten one at that).

All in all, not a bad set of trips and I wasn’t beaten up or worn out from it at all. Probably totaled out to something like 6 or 7 miles, at most, though. I haven’t driven my car in well over a week, though we did take Eunice’s car out for a short journey to ch-hill. In all, though, the bike commuting has to be doing something for my relative footprint.

This morning we got up, biked over (using our super-secret no-car route) to the farmer’s market. Collected a lot of vegetables and baked goods, then back to wellspring for toothpaste. Only like 4-5 miles, but it was pleasant and I kinda liked seeing the tops of the radishes sticking out of my panniers.

I took a bit of a nap due to the slices of pineapple-apricot bread I had for breakfast then got down to beating up my todo list. New, self-watering container of lettuce is planted. This time a bit less densely to see if I can get better results. We’re supposed to head back out in a little bit to get some coffee for the girl and chase around the neighborhood to see which houses are for sale.